Commentary

Study Says Use Of Chatbots Rising

Personalized one-to-one communication with consumers represents a new competitive advantage for brands such as chatbots in search in Bing and messaging apps on social platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

LiveWorld released the white paper Messaging Apps and Chatbots for Brand Marketing on Tuesday, which examines the advantages of branded conversations, the challenges companies face within messaging apps, and how conversational marketing will impact the future of brand engagement. It is based on a survey of Fortune 500 marketers.

Some 52% expressed confidence in the ability of existing two-way communications platforms and tools such as chatbots, social media networks and messaging apps to meet their needs, but 79% of marketers believe an expansion of the digital marketing category is needed to improve on two-way conversations between brands and consumers.

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Not surprisingly, the study notes that experienced marketers are more likely to experiment with chatbots. But the percentages of those who have used chatbots are pretty low, considering that Bing integrated chatbots into its search engine within the past year.

Nearly 60% of marketers participating in the study said they had not used a chatbot for customer interactions, and another 20% ranked their level of interaction as a 2 on a 5-point scale. Some 5% of marketers affirmed the use of chatbots for customer interaction frequently. The study also reveals that chatbot use is on the rise. Only 6% plan to decrease their use of chatbots.

Two in five marketers participating in the study believe that chatbot use will increase for their company in 2017. Respondents with 15 or more years of experience, identified as “veteran/encyclopedic” marketers, noted the need for chatbots, with 49% saying they plan to increase their use of chatbots.

About 9% of “veteran” marketers frequently use chatbots to communicate with customers.

Engagement and customer satisfaction are leading KPIs when implementing what the white paper calls one-on-one communication tools such as messaging apps and chatbots.

1 comment about "Study Says Use Of Chatbots Rising".
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  1. Ashish Jain from Coviam, December 8, 2017 at 11:07 a.m.

    Very well written - bots will be the primary interaction channel of the future and holds a lot of promise against current and traditional formats.  The challenge is to make the interaction design more intuitive, demystify the tech/ engineering side to bring it into more acceptance of the masses by displaying value, and increase utilization for business cases. The 24x7 self-service and intelligent nature of the format is already being used for customer service, conversational commerce, health tech and education. We have started on the journey at Engati, do visit us to give us feedback on www.engati.com

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